CANADA'S IN THE VERY BEST OF HANDS. Canadian State Department cables, courtesy of Wikileaks, show diplomats opining to one another that Canada's notorious hate speech laws provoke "little public debate or public interest," and that Canada is crawling with white supremacists. It's as though our elites live in a bubble.

FRODO BAGGINS: savior of Middle Earth, or just another war criminal?

SECURITY THEATER isn't the only option!  There's also Wile E. Coyote and Roadrunner….

(ACME schematics via Bruce Schneier)

HOPE: Mike Huckabee will not seek the Republican nomination. We interviewed Governor Huckabee for Popehat TV back in 2008, about weight loss and finding common ground between social conservatives and libertarians. He seemed too sane and well-adjusted a man to really want the Presidency. Donald Trump on the other hand may not be sane, but he knows how to play the political media as well as the entertainment media.

TRANSPARENCY: The Justice Department seeks to block testimony about the role of Pakistani intelligence in the Mumbai terror attacks.

I FOR ONE WELCOME OUR ROBOT OVERLORDS: Paraplegic student Austin Whitney walked to receive his high school diploma, with the assistance of a robotic exoskeleton.

DON'T FIGHT THE CRIME IF YOU CAN'T DO THE TIME. "The Petoskey Department of Public Safety said officers pulled the man back onto the roof and found a baton type striking weapon, a can of chemical irritant spray, and a pair of lead lined gloves. … He is being kept in the Emmet County Jail."

HEADACHES OF THE HOME OCTOPUS ENTHUSIAST: "The repeated disappearance of crabs or fish from nearby tanks has sometimes turned out to be “late night snacks” for a hungry octopus that is able to figure out that there is food a short distance away – the clever octopus figures out how to escape it’s tank, capture a quick snack, and then return home to enjoy it’s meal." With guidance on the proper toys to keep your octopod stimulated.

DAVE KRUEGER, CHANNELING RADLEY BALKO: Dozens of cops caught on video running roughshod over the Constitution. Naturally it's all the fault of the videographer, and the public defender who dared assert his clients' legal rights.

HOPE AND SAME: "During his presidential campaign, Obama repeatedly said he would call off the Drug Enforcement Administration’s raids on both medical marijuana users and their suppliers…. Two weeks after Obama took office, a White House spokesman reiterated that position…. Yet the DEA’s medical marijuana raids not only have continued but are more frequent under Obama than they were under George W. Bush."  There's an expiration date on everything Obama says.

DON'T BOGART or we'll search the joint.

PRIMITIVE AMERICANS: IN EUROPE, RAPE IS A PLEASURE OF THE FLESH.

Gilles Savary, a member of the European Parliament who belongs to Mr. Strauss-Kahn’s Socialist Party, wrote on his blog that the arrest of Mr. Strauss-Kahn had hints of American-style hypocrisy. “Everyone knows that Dominique Strauss-Kahn is a libertine, and that he is distinguished from others by the fact that he doesn’t try and hide it,” he wrote. “In puritanical American, infiltrated by rigorous Protestantism, financial misdeeds are far more tolerated than pleasures of the flesh.”

Which isn't to say that rapists aren't admired and respected by many on this side of the Atlantic.  Even child molestation is praiseworthy, if the rapist sodomizes his victim artistically.

THE LAWS OF SUPPLY AND DEMAND, it turns out, are actually laws. Not guidelines, as some would have us believe. If you're willing to pay for health care, you'll get health care. If you want to pay for bureaucracy and rent-seeking, you'll get …

DISAPPOINTMENT. Higher than expected tax collections may force Jerry Brown to back down on increasing California's already astronomical tax rates. Of course if past performance is any guide the California legislature will be happy to spend it all, and then some.

EVERYONE KNOWS that if you call for a pizza, an ambulance, and a cop, you'll get the pizza first.  Now, apply the logic behind that joke to space exploration, and predict who'll dominate space in the next century. That is, unless the government steps in. For our own protection of course.

Via Brian Dunbar.